USFG is key to solving current transportation issues – urban renewal, disaster relief, social equity, and security

National authority is key to foreign relations.

Many foreign affairs scholars believe that federalism is, or at least should be, irrelevant to foreign affairs.4 Under this view, the nation must speak with one voice, not fifty voices, if it is to operate effectively in the international realm. In addition, if individual states are allowed to engage in foreign affairs activities, the argument goes, they will be in a position to impose harmful externalities on the entire nation—for example, by triggering retaliatory sanctions against the United States. For these reasons, as Professor Louis Henkin con-tends in his influential book on foreign affairs law, "Foreign relations are na-tional relations."5 This is the view I am calling "one voice nationalism." Proponents of one voice nationalism often rely on broad statements made during the Founding period.° The constitutional Founders generally agreed that, during the Articles of Confederation period, the national government had not been given sufficient power to conduct foreign relations? The Founders thus often referred to the need for more national control in this area. In defending the constitutional grants of foreign affairs powers to the national government, James Madison stated in The Federalist that, "if we are to be one nation in any respect, it clearly ought to be in respect to other nations."8 Similarly, in defending cer-tain grants of federal court Jurisdiction over foreign affairs matters, Alexander Hamilton stated that "the peace of the WHOLE ought not to be left at the dispo-sal of a PART."8 These statements are often quoted out of context to suggest that the Constitution disallows the states from doing anything that might affect foreign relations. Supporters of one voice nationalism also typically rely on broad Supreme Court dicta from decisions during the late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth centuryi° They rely on the Court's statement in the 1889 Chi-nese Exclusion Case that, "For local interests the several States of the Union exist, but for national purposes, embracing our relations with foreign nations, we are but one people. one nation, one power."11 And they quote United States v. Belmont, decided in 1942, for the proposition that, "in respect of our foreign relations generally, state lines disappear. As to such purpose . . the State does not exist."12 Professor Henkin, for example, ties this quotation from Belmont to the broad statements from the Founding, stating that, "At the end of the twenti-eth century as at the end of the eighteenth, as regards U.S. foreign relations, the states 'do not exist.-13